The Imagined

If the imagined woman makes the real womanseem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking ingracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,and if you come to realize the imagined womancan only satisfy your imagination, whereasthe real woman with all her limitationscan often make you feel good, how, in spiteof knowing this, does the imagined womankeep getting into your bedroom, and joining youat dinner, why is it that you always bring her alongon vacations when the real woman is shopping,or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someoneprobably with her at this very moment, in factdoing and saying everything she’s ever wanted,would you want to know that he slips into her life every day from a secret doorwayshe’s made for him, that he’s present even whenyou’re eating your omelette at breakfast,or do you prefer how she goes about the house as she does, as if there were just the two of you?Isn’t her silence, finally, loving? And yoursnot entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come,

once again, not to talk about it?

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